THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH DEVELOPED THEOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL ANTI-SEMITISM

Martin M. van Brauman

 

 

For you are a holy people to the Lord, your God; the Lord, your God, has chosen you to be for Him a treasured people above all the peoples that are on the face of the earth.  Not because you are more numerous than all the peoples did the Lord desire you and choose you, for you are the fewest of all the peoples.  Rather, because of the Lord’s love for you and because He observes the oath that He swore to your forefathers did He take you out with a strong hand and redeem you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.  You must know that the Lord, your God – He is the God, the faithful God, Who safeguards the covenant and the kindness for those who love Him and for those who observe His commandments, for a thousand generations. Deuteronomy 7:6-9

Theological anti-Semitism developed from the established church leadership and influenced by the dominance of Hellenistic thought and Roman law.[1]  The Jewish people are identified by a religion and contrary to other religions the religion of Judaism is inseparable from the Jews.[2]  With Judaism as the root of the other monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam, religious rivalry has fostered a continuing hostility, which is embedded within their very teachings and official religious dogma.[3]

The religious foundation of the Christian Church was based and still today on the traditional church dogma of replacement theology, in which the Jewish people’s rejection of Jesus resulted in the loss of their covenantal link to God and in their eternal damnation.  Christian theological anti-Semitism was derived from three primary causes: the rejection of Jesus as the messiah, the doctrine of chosenness and the accusation of deicide, or Christ-killers.[4]

Cultural anti-Semitism developed from the language, images and instincts over centuries of a Christian dominating environment as defined by theological anti-Semitism.[5]  To understand theological anti-Semitism is to understand the role of a small ancient tribe of people standing against evil in every age, in which they have lived.[6]  Generally, theological anti-Semitism is fundamentally a hatred of Jewish values, beliefs, chosenness and God Himself.  Judaism consists of five components: (1) God, (2) Torah [the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy], (3) chosenness, (4) Jewish nationhood and (5) Israel.[7]  The Jews’ affirmation of one or more of these components threatens the gods, national allegiance, laws and cultures of non-Jews.[8]  Unfortunately, most Christians do not understand the Scriptural significance of these five components.

To recognize the evils of anti-Semitism as an attack on God, one must understand these components of Judaism, which are puzzling to the Christian community still wrapped up in the images of the legalistic religious authorities at the time of Jesus as representing Judaism.  These legalistic Temple administrators created a barrier to the people’s relationship to God.  With the destruction of the Temple by the Romans and the disappearance of the Sadducees, God removed that barrier.  For Judaism is not a religion, but a relationship with God.

Judaism is a living faith, a religion of history and a religion of time not space, aiming at the sanctification of time.[9]  The Jewish Sabbath symbolizes the sanctification of time, in which “the Sabbaths are our great cathedrals,” representing a day of separation from space and the material things that fill it, a day of devotion to time and the eternity that fills it.[10]  The observance of Jewish law is not as ritual and ceremony, but as a manifestation of religious Truth, Tiferet.[11]

Abraham Heschel wrote that the “central thought of Judaism is the living God.”[12]  Heschel has described Judaism as a “relationship between man with Torah and God.”[13]  He wrote that there is a way that leads to understanding of God in which “. . . you will find Him, if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul.”  Deuteronomy 9:29.[14]  Heschel wrote that:

Knowledge of God is knowledge of living with God.  Israel’s religious existence consists of three inner attitudes: engagement to the living God to whom we are accountable; engagement to Torah where His voice is audible; and engagement to His concern as expressed in commandments.  Engagement to God comes about in acts of the soul.  Engagement to Torah is the result of study and communion with its words.  Engagement to His concern comes about through attachment to the essentials of worship.  Its meaning is disclosed in acts of worship.[15]

Faith is vision, sensitivity and attachment to God.[16]  By living as a Jew one may attain his faith as a Jew, but one does not have faith because of deeds.[17]  In response to God’s Will, we perceive His presence in our deeds.[18]

The Jews’ monotheism, which has been perceived to conflict with the divine and messianic claims of Jesus, has been the contributing aspect in the Jewish perception of Christianity.[19]  Both Jews and Christians believe that God is One and there is no other god besides Him.  However, most Christian church dogma over the centuries has presented deviations from and conflicts with the teachings of the Christian Gospels, which have influenced this Jewish perception of all of Christianity worshiping a different God, a non-Jewish Jesus, instead of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Primarily, the monotheism debate has centered on God in different manifestations as He relates to man, since God is infinite and without form.  The Holy Bible speaks in the language of men.  “In the language of men” the spiritual attributes of God are described.  The Holy Bible adjusts the picture of God, so man can understand the conveying theology, and presents God in human terms with respect to seeing, hearing, walking and reaching out even though God is without form.

Does God reveal Himself using many manifestations in communicating with man?  In Genesis 1:2, the breath of God was hovering upon the surface of the waters, which means the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters as a manifestation of God.  Isaiah speaks “And now My Lord, My God, has sent me with His spirit.” Isaiah 48:16.  God sent Isaiah with His spirit to speak in His name.

Is the coming of the Messiah another manifestation of God?[20] Jewish faith is a faith of expectation, a waiting for God, a waiting for the Davidic Messiah’s arrival and the coming of the promised day of the Lord, a day of judgment followed by salvation when evil is consumed.[21]  For the Jew, the coming of the Messiah represents the promise of the Exodus and the Revelation at Sinai being fulfilled.

A staff will emerge from the stump of Jesse (David) and a shoot will sprout from his roots.  The spirit of the Lord will rest upon him – a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and strength, a spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord . . . He will strike [the wicked of] the world with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.  Righteousness will be the girdle round his loins, and faith will be the girdle round his waist. Isaiah 11:1-5. 

Behold, a day is coming for the Lord . . . the Lord will go out and wage war with those nations, as He waged war on the day of battle.  His feet will stand on that day on the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem on the east . . Zechariah 14: 1-4.

Under Deuteronomy 6:4 (The Shema), the Torah says that God is the One and Only as “an inner harmony for all that He does, though human intelligence cannot comprehend what it is . . .  [but] . . . will be understood at the End of Days, when God’s ways are illuminated.”[22]  This concept of God’s ways is like a ray of light seen through a prism in which, though the viewer sees a myriad of different colors, it is a single ray of light.[23]  Likewise, God’s many manifestations are truly One and the Jew bears witness to God’s Oneness by the recitation of The Shema.[24]

In Genesis 1:3 when God said, “Let there be light,” the “light” was not natural light, but the Divine utterance, the “commanded emanation of light from the light of Torah,”[25] which also points to the coming of the Messiah, the “Light” to the world in the End of Days.  The Torah is the blueprint of existence of the world and represents the eternal foundation of Judaism, the destiny of Israel and the essence of the Jewish people.  Since the Torah is the blueprint for creation, it preceded creation and since the Torah is made of Hebrew letters, the letters themselves preceded creation.[26]

Abraham Heschel said in God in Search of Man that:

The Torah, we are told, is both concealed and revealed, and so is the nature of all reality.  All things are both known and unknown, plain and enigmatic, transparent and impenetrable.  ‘Hidden are the things that we see; we do not know what we see.’  The world is both open and concealed, a matter of fact and a mystery.  We know and do not know – this is our condition.[27]  

The Torah is the organic part of the Jewish spiritual being and cannot be exchanged or replaced with anything else.[28]  The Torah is the bridge from heaven to earth.

The Torah is the eternal, living monument of God’s rendezvous with Israel, the nation’s raison d’etre, the soul that enables the nation to survive every trial, to rise to undreamed of spiritual heights and realize the goal and hope of its Creator.

Whenever the Torah is read, Jews relive the Revelation at Sinai, when our ancestors gathered around a lowly mountain and heard God speak to them.  As they did then, we seek to come closer to our Maker by hearing His teachings and rededicating ourselves to their fulfillment.

. . .

‘The Torah should not seem to you like a stale royal decree that no one values, but like a new one, toward which everyone rushes.’ (Deuteronomy 6:6)[29]

Moses Maimonides, also known as the Rambam, formulated two principles of Faith concerning the Torah out of his Thirteen Principles[30] as the immutable word of God in Ani Maamin:

 I believe with complete faith that the entire Torah now in our hands is the same one that was given to Moses, our teacher, peace be upon him.

I believe with complete faith that this Torah will not be exchanged, nor will there be another Torah from the Creator, Blessed is His Name.

Every letter in the Torah is “infinite” and “there is a depth far deeper in the words of Torah than the human consciousness can conceive.”[31] Forever, the Lord, Your word stands firm in the heavens. Psalms 119:89. Grass withers and blossom fades, but the word of our God shall stand forever. Isaiah 40:8. Jesus said that It is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of a pen to drop out of the Law. Luke 16:17. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. 2 Timothy 3:16.  Rabbi Nosson Scherman wrote in “An Overview: Torah – Written and Oral” in The Chumash,

Torah is the blueprint and its study is the soul of Creation, were it not for My covenant [i.e., the study of Torah], day and night I would not have appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth (Jeremiah 33:25).  The privilege of accepting the Torah from God, of carrying out its precepts, and of finding its sacred sparks in the darkest corners of earthly existence, belongs to Israel.  Thus, the Torah and Israel are twin purposes of Creation.  To embody Torah in a physical garb and to enable Israel to elevate spiritual potential from the morass of the mundane, were heaven and earth created.

Abraham Heschel wrote that the participation in Torah and Israel, the leap of action, with discipline in daily life, brings us close to Him.[32]  Israel is that people to whom God gave His Torah from Sinai and who accepted God’s Torah at Sinai.[33]

The Chofetz Chaim [Rabbi Yisroel Meir Kagan of Radin, 1835-1933] would say that solutions for all of life’s trials and tribulations can be found in the Torah. . . There is no question in the world that does not have an answer in the Torah. Even a wood merchant pondering the purchase of a forest can find his answer within the Torah.  All that is needed is ‘illuminated’ eyes to find it.[34]

All of life’s happenings are inscribed in the Torah: all that was, is, and will be [forever] – everything is included in the Torah.[35]

All Israel in every generation stands before Sinai and Israel became free, not at the Red Sea, but at Sinai.[36]  All Jewish souls, living, dead and yet to be born stood at Mount Sinai.  Within all Jews is a spark of memory of Sinai and an affinity to Torah and its study and values.  That spark lies deep within Jewish souls that makes one Jewish as a people, a nationhood, a faith and the light to the world. Not with you alone do I seal this covenant and this imprecation, but with whoever is here, standing with us today before the Lord, our God, and with whoever is not here with us today. Deuteronomy 29:13-14. The covenant was binding even on unborn generations who were not present to enter into it.  The body is but a moment in the life of the soul that is eternal, for the soul is not in the body but rather the body is in the soul.[37]

The Torah is God’s revelation from Sinai.[38]

If all the oceans were ink

All the reeds quills

Skies scrolls of parchment

And All living men scribes

They would not be able to

Record all the wisdom of

the Torah.[39]

 Israel has a divinely ordained mission to bring knowledge of the true God and Divine Law, the Torah, to the nations of the world.[40]

And now, if you hearken well to Me and observe My covenant you shall be to Me the most beloved treasure of all people, for Mine is the entire world.  You shall be to Me a kingdom of ministers and a holy nation. Exodus 19:5-6.

“A kingdom of ministers” means that the entire nation of Israel is to be dedicated to leading the world toward an understanding and acceptance of God’s mission.[41]  Along with being a nation of priests, the Jewish people are a people set apart from the nations of the world. I am the Lord, your God, Who has separated you from the peoples . . . You shall be holy for Me, for I the Lord am holy; and I have separated you from the peoples to be Mine. Leviticus 20:24, 26.

The Jewish soul (“being Jewish”) has the mission as the torch-bearers, the light among the nations, of the Torah, which is the spiritual light contained within the Torah.  God’s purpose in giving the Jews the Torah was so Jewish souls would be alive in His Torah.[42]  The Torah is the Tree of Life through which God “planted eternal life within us,”[43] a tree of life to those who grasp her. Proverbs 3:18.  In Genesis, the Tree of Life is in the center of the Garden of Eden, representing eternal life.  The cherubim were the guardian angles of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and they were the two figures placed above the Ark of the Covenant containing the Torah.[44]

May Your dead (God’s righteous people) come to life, may my corpses (Isaiah’s people, Israel) arise. Awake and shout for joy, you who rest in the dirt! For Your dew is like the dew that [revives] vegetation. May You topple the lifeless [wicked] to the ground! Isaiah 26:19.

This is God’s promise and Israel’s hope of restoration eschatology.[45]

Many of those who sleep in the dusty earth will awaken: these for everlasting life and these for shame, for everlasting abhorrence. The wise will shine like the radiance of the firmament, and those who teach righteousness to the multitudes [will shine] like the stars, forever and ever. Daniel 12:2-3.

Eschatology refers to the events that Jews believed God had ordained to occur at the end of history.[46]  Restoration eschatology arose from the prophetic reaction to the Jewish experience of exile in Babylonia in the 6^th century B.C.E., as well as out of reflections during the postexilic period of foreign domination in Israel.[47]

Chosenness has nothing to do with merit, but by His grace for “You shall be holy for Me, for I the Lord am holy; and I have separated you from the peoples to be Mine.” Leviticus 20: 26.[48]  Jews are the chosen people and chosen as a people, they are not a people consisting of individually chosen persons.[49]  Chosen means to have no choice.[50]  God chooses by His grace and the Jewish people were chosen to be not like the gentiles.[51]

 . . . How, then, will it be known that I have found favor in Your eyes – I and Your people – unless You accompany us, and I and Your people will be made distinct from every people on the face of the earth!”  The Lord said to Moses, “Even this thing of which you spoke I shall do, for you have found favor in My eyes, and I have known you by name.” Exodus 33:16-17.

It is their mission that separates them, which is to attest to the chosenness of every human being.[52]  Every human being is holy and that is the testimony that the Chosen People are elected to bear.[53]  The Jewish people believe that “compassionate righteousness and moral justice” eventually will take over the world and that through the Jewish people the world will be blessed with peace and freedom as proclaimed in Genesis 18:19.

God’s election of Israel is the foundation for everything that Israel has to tell the world and for its continuing existence as His witness.[54]  Israel testifies of God by telling its own history as a history with God.[55]  The Jewish people understand themselves linked to God and so are witnesses to the eternal covenant between themselves and God.[56]  Every Shabbat observed, every kosher meal eaten, every mitzvah performed, every son circumcised, every act of solidarity with the people is another expression of that witness.[57]

Rabbi Moshe Ben Nachman (1195-1270)(referred to as the Ramban or Nachmanides) declared that the three basic principles of faith are the existence of the Creator, His providence over the world and the truth of prophecy.[58]  By observing the commandments of the Torah with the proper intent of heart, the Jewish people continually witness to the creation of the world, the Creator’s providence over the world, and their belief in prophecy as well as in all fundamental principles of the Torah.[59]  The purpose of the commandments of the Torah is to protect Israel against deviating from these principles.[60]

The declaration of the continuance of the Jews’ divine election has been a major cause of theological anti-Semitism by repudiating Christian replacement theology.  The belief that God chose the Jews over all other religions, tribes and nations to be His messengers to the world has fueled theological anti-Semitism.  Jewish chosenness has meant that Jews have believed themselves to be chosen by God to spread ethical monotheism to the world and to live as a moral “light for the nations.”  The doctrine of chosenness is not a doctrine of superiority, but a doctrine of special responsibility to God.[61]

 He said: It is insufficient that you be a servant for Me [only] to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the ruins of Israel; I will make you a light for the nations, so that My salvation may extend to the ends of the earth. Isaiah 49:6.

Judaism, unlike other religions, incorporates nationhood, which means that committed Jews in the Diaspora are theoretically members of two peoples – the Jewish people and the people among whom they reside in the Diaspora, a nation within a nation.  As James Parkes stated in A History of Palestine From 135 A.D. to Modern Times, the Jewish people

 even when they were scattered in a thousand ghettoes in innumerable different Christian and Muslim countries, the Jews recognized themselves as, and were universally recognized by others to be, a single people . . . They were recognized as both a religion and a nation, and it occurred to no one that there was anything inconsistent in the dual attribution . . . This recognition by themselves and others that they were still a single people reinforces the naturalness of their continued association with the land of their independent history and of the lawgivers and prophets.[62]

While the Jewish people were scattered throughout the world, they never ceased to see the Land of Israel as their ancient homeland and to realize in their own lives the religious duty of pilgrimage.  God’s covenant with Abraham of Jewish nationhood and the connection with the Land of Israel are eternal, for “even though the merit of the Patriarchs may have dissipated over the generations, a covenant, by definition, is irrevocable.” Genesis 15:9 (commentary).

And He took him outside, and said, “Gaze, now, toward the Heavens, and count the stars if you are able to count them!” And He said to him, “So shall your offspring be!”  And he trusted in the Lord, and He reckoned it to him as righteousness. He said to him, “I am the Lord Who brought you out of Ur-kasdim to give you this land to inherit it.” Genesis 15: 5-7.

. . .

On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants have I given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates River: the Kennite, the Kenizzite, and the Kadmonite; the Hittite, the Perizzite, and the Rephain; the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Girgashite, and the Jebusite.” Genesis 15: 18-19.

. . . the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, I am El Shaddai; walk before Me and be perfect.  I will set My covenant between Me and you . . . your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations . . .  I will ratify My covenant between Me and you and between your offspring after you, throughout their generations, as an everlasting covenant, to be a God to you and to your offspring after you; and I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojourns – the whole of the land of Canaan – as an everlasting possession; and I shall be a God to them. Genesis 17:1-8.

And God appeared to Jacob . . . Your name shall not always be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name. . . The land that I gave to Abraham and to Isaac, I will give to you; and to your offspring after you I will give the land. Genesis 35: 9-12.

Hatred toward the Jews is as old as the Jewish people with the first signs indicated at the time of the Revelation at Sinai.[63]  Before Christianity, pagan hostility to Judaism existed with Judaism’s rejection of the pagan gods and the pagan way of life.[64]  Jewish hatred was expressed as irritation, primarily as cultural anti-Semitism, resulting from Jewish separateness, rather than the distinct hatred that later characterized theological anti-Semitism.[65]

When God revealed himself at Sinai and entered into a covenant with them as His people, He gave the gentile world Sin’at Yisrael, hatred of Israel.[66]  Elie Wiesel has stated that hatred of the Jews was born with the Torah before Christianity.[67]  The hostility to Jews in the Hellenistic pagan world was connected with Jewish monotheism and the fact that Judaism demanded a distinct separation of Jews from the general population.[68]

Judaism has been the basis of the universality of anti-Semitism over thousands of years from Hellenistic and Roman times to today and into the future as foretold in Deuteronomy 28:37, 64-68 below.[69]

You will be a source of astonishment, a parable, and a conversation piece, among all the peoples where the Lord will lead you.[70]

The Lord will scatter you among all the peoples, from the end of the earth to the end of the earth, and there you will work for gods of others, whom you did not know – you or your forefathers – of wood and of stone. And among those nations you will not be tranquil, there will be no rest for the sole of your foot; there the Lord will give you a trembling heart, longing of eyes, and suffering of soul.  Your life will hang in the balance, and you will be frightened night and day, and you will not be sure of your livelihood. In the morning you will say, “Who can give back last night!” And in the evening you will say, “Who can give back this morning!” – for the fright of your heart that you will fear and the sight of your eyes that you will see.  The Lord will return you to Egypt in ships, on the road of which I said to you, “You shall never again see it!” And there you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as slaves and maidservants – but there will be no buyer!

“[T]here will be no buyer” for the world did not want the impoverished Jews, stripped of their properties, possessions and citizenships trying to escape Nazi-controlled Europe in the 1930s, or whenever they were driven out from any country in the past or the present, Christian or Muslim.

In Canaan, Amalek tried to destroy the Jewish people after their Exodus from Egypt, since the Amalekites were the descendants of Esau who hated Jacob.[71]  Haman, a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag, attempted to destroy the Jewish people in the Persian Empire during the 5^th century BCE, because Jews lived by their own laws (Esther 3:8), rather than by those of the Persian state, and were seen as an impediment to the Persian government.[72]

Cicero, a Roman statesman and philosopher (106-43 BCE), wrote how the pagan ‘gods’ had turned against the “superstitious” followers of the God of Israel:

Justice demands that the barbaric superstition [Judaism] should be opposed; and it is to the interest of the state not to regard that Jewish mob which at times breaks out in open riots . . . At one time the Jewish people took up arms against the Romans; but the gods showed how little they cared for this people, suffering it to be conquered and made a tributary [of the Roman Empire].[73]

Apion of Alexandria, a Greco-Egyptian writer, had vilified Jewish worship in the late 30s and early 40s of the 1^st century CE and made the first accusation of ritual murder in temple ceremonies.[74]  For Apion and other anti-Semitic writers, such as Lysimachus, the primary motivation for the vilification of Jewish religion and history was to prevent any Jewish claim to citizenship, since the Jews refused to worship the Alexandrian gods or the emperor and were considered outsiders.[75]

Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian, rebutted Apion in his Contra Apionem.[76]  According to Josephus, Apion claimed that the Jews belonged “to a tribe of lepers capable, if not desirous, of contaminating the entire world.”[77]  Apion expanded the Egyptian popular myths that depicted the Jews as sordid and disease-ridden people, who were driven out of Egypt as lepers.[78] Both Apion and Democritus accused the Jews of ritual murder.[79]  The attempted rewriting of the history of the Jewish Exodus favorable to the Egyptians is a pattern of historical revisionism by the enemies of the Jewish people that still exists today with the creation of a Palestinian people, who never existed as a people or a country, and the denial of the ancient Jewish homeland in Israel with Jerusalem as its capitol and even of the Holocaust.

The Jews’ attempt to attain citizenship in Alexandria was the cause of the riots of 38-41 CE, since they held a privileged status as the middlemen between the Greek rulers and the native Egyptian population.[80]  The local Greek community accused the Jews of having dual loyalties when the Judean king Herod Agrippa I visited Alexandria during this period.[81]  The Roman governor Flaccus, rather than punishing the rioters, drove the Jews into the first known ghetto in a small quarter of Alexandria and took away their civic rights.[82]  The Greco-Egyptian and Greek writers claimed that the Jewish separateness and chosenness was a conspiracy against the Greco-Egyptian population and the values shared by all civilized society.[83]

Apion spread his anti-Judaism ideas to Rome and influenced the writings of Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus.[84]   With the rise of the anti-Semitic movement in 19^th century Germany, the intellectuals fashionably cited to these ancient writers to support their anti-Semitism and how the Jews should be treated.[85]  However, political and cultural anti-Semitism could not have developed to the intensity experienced in Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe without the injurious image of the Jew that emerged from theological anti-Semitism.[86]

Riots erupted again in Alexandria in 66 CE following the news of the first Judean revolt against the Romans.  The Roman governor’s “troops reportedly killed 50,000 Jews.”[87]  When Rome waged the first Jewish war during 66 through 73 C.E. and destroyed Jerusalem, 600,000 Jews were killed according to Josephus and Tacitus and in the second Jewish War from 132 to 135 C.E. over 850,000 Jews were killed.[88]

In 130 CE, Emperor Hadrian sought to destroy Judaism by building a pagan city, Aelia Capitolina, over the ruins of Jerusalem and honoring the Roman god Jupiter Capitolinus.[89] After the Second Jewish War, Judea was renamed Syria Palestina, an ancient Greek designation referring to the Jews’ old enemy, the Philistines and later the term “Palestine” was adopted by the Arab conquerors.[90]

Palestine was an incorrect translation of the word Philistia from the Hebrew word Peleshet, the Land of the Philistines.[91]  During the late Roman period, the name Palestine appeared as the name of the province and general area but vanished after the beginning of Arab rule.[92]  The name Palestine does not occur in the New Testament.[93]  The formation of a political entity called Palestine was one of the lasting novelties of the British Mandate period.[94]  During the prior Ottoman period Jerusalem was the capital of the district of Jerusalem, but the Holy Land was composed of several separate districts ruled from other cities, such as Safed, Nabulus and Gaza, and with all of them sub-dividsions of larger provinces governed at various times from Damascus, Sidon, or Beirut.[95]

During the second Roman war against the Jews, the total defeat of the Jews led to a complete split between Judaism and Christianity in the second century and the Christians viewed the destruction of the Jewish Temple and the Jewish state as an act of God’s punishment towards the Jews.[96]  The Gospels, written after the first Judean revolt, shifted the responsibility for Jesus’ crucifixion to the Jews instead of the Romans and for deicide the Jews became an accursed people condemned to permanent exile and wandering, while the Christian church became the new “Israel” and the only recipient of the divine promises to Abraham.[97]

Theological anti-Semitism is rooted in one of the most controversial passage in the synoptic Gospels of Matthew 27:22-26, which portrays the Jewish crowd demanding the execution of Jesus and exclaiming “[h]is blood be on us and on our children!” after Pilate, washing his hands, declared himself innocent of the shedding of Jesus’ blood.[98]  This passage became the centerpiece of the Christ-killer accusation and the basis for Jewish violence by the Christian community over the centuries.

During the first centuries, there was a gradual separation between what would later be categorized as “Rabbinic Judaism” and “Christianity” with the New Testament being referred to as “a discourse of divorce.”[99]  The earliest form of Christianity has been referred to as “Jewish Christianity.”[100]

The Gospel of Matthew dates from the late 70s or early 80s of the first century.[101]  During this time period with the Jewish rebellion against Rome (66-70) and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple (70), most Jews assumed that the disasters expressed the will of God for his people, forsaking their covenant with Him.[102]

Out of these disasters, the rabbis of the Talmud replaced the Pharisees and Temple worship administered by the Sadducees.[103]  The Sadducees were an aristocratic, upper-class religio-political group movement that administered the rites of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem since the time of King Solomon and who insisted on a literal reading of the Written Torah without any interpretation.[104]  When the Temple was destroyed, the Sadducees disappeared from history.[105]  The Pharisees were a religio-political party that helped shape the future Rabbinic Judaism by believing that two Torahs, or sets of instructions, were revealed by God at Mount Sinai, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah.[106]  The Oral Torah was finally written down and became the Talmud, which added enrichment, insights and constant interpretations to the Written Torah.[107]

The Pharisees honored the Rabbis and Sages who believed in continuous revelation and that spiritual enlightenment and God’s teachings are continuous and constantly evolving.[108]  They believed that the Written Torah and Oral Torah did not require a Temple to ensure the survival of Judaism, but by teaching to the dispersed, establishing synagogues and teaching Torah.[109]

Under Rabbinic Judaism, the three pillars that support the very existence of the universe are the Torah, service of God and kind deeds and at the pinnacle of the universe stands prayer.[110]

. . . when the Holy Temple stood, “service” was the sacrificial service, and following its destruction, prayer took the place of the offerings . . . man’s obligation to pray is the commandment that man should serve God with all your heart (Deuteronomy 11:14).  What is the service of the heart?  . . . when the Torah speaks of “service,” it refers to the offerings brought in the Temple or on an altar . . . What service is performed in the heart? . . . That service . . . is prayer . . . It equates the Jew’s daily prayer to the sacrificial service in the Temple, the most sacred place on earth. [111]

Thus, the sincere prayer of every Jewish person represents their personal “service of the heart” that is elevated to the “pinnacle of the universe!”[112]

During the early 2^nd century, a believing Jew to accept Jesus would have to take a position requiring a “demeaning of the Jewish scriptures, the Jewish cult, [and] the Jewish covenant with God.”[113]  Ironically, a Jew would accept Jesus “only by rejecting – betraying – everything Jesus himself believed.”[114]

The early Christian community believed that the Jews, who had rejected Jesus, had effectively removed themselves from God’s favor and as the Chosen People.[115]  The Church never ceased to fear the rival influence of Judaism and contact of Christians with Jews.  The first law insisted by the Church on the new Christian empire was the prohibition of Jews to make converts, turning Judaism into a more closed faith.[116]  Christianity had the task of imposing moral standards that were Jewish morality on a pagan world, while Judaism was trying to survive within its own community without a Jewish homeland, government, or Temple.

During the middle of the second century, Melito of Sardis prepared an Easter liturgy, On the Pascha, condemning the Jews collectively as Christ killers and forfeiting their favored status in God’s plan for the salvation of the world.[117] On the Pascha sought converts from Judaism by contending that the Jewish Passover was now worthless by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, cancelling the Law of Moses.[118]

In his Epistles, Ignatius of Antioch (ca. 70-107) contended that the church is the new Israel and the prophets and heroes of Israel were spiritual ancestors of the church and thus they were Christians before their time and not part of Judaism.[119]  The Christian churches initially observed both the “Lord’s Day,” the first day of the week as the anniversary of Christ’s resurrection, and the Jewish Sabbath, but Ignatius insisted that churches cease to observe the Jewish Sabbath.[120]  In Exodus 20:8-11, the fourth commandment says to remember the Sabbath day, to sanctify it and to remember that He is the Creator by observing the Sabbath.  Sunday was a pagan Roman day of sun worship.  Later, the Christian annual calendar separated Easter from its origins in the Passover celebration.[121]  Easter was a pagan fertility festival and December 25, Christmas Day, was the Roman day of Saturnalia, a day of orgy.

Ignatius wrote that the Lord’s Supper was the “medicine of immorality”, as symbolic language, but by the time of Irenaeus, during the ritual after the bread had been consecrated, it was no longer bread but had been transformed to convey spiritual grace to men and women.  Justin Marty taught about 165 CE that baptism completes Salvation and Iraneaus, who wrote about 185 CE, contended in his writings that baptism is the New Birth and brings Regeneration.

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were given the name sacrament from the Latin military oath of loyalty, which carried with it the idea that the physical elements possessed Salvation and spiritual grace.  The water of baptism came to be viewed as having saving efficacy.  Once the Church established that baptism and the elements of the Lord’s Supper were channels of grace, then the Church decreed that only a priest authorized and ordained by the Church could administer this grace.

All of the ancient pagan cults had their priests and rituals as part of their religious worship.  The introduction of pagan ideas of external efficacy in the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper demanded that such power be preserved by securing trained and qualified persons to administer them.  People began to believe that only the bishop or those trained and authorized by him could effectively call forth the grace resident in these ordinances.  Salvation became identified with the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and these were effective only under the supervision of the bishop.  Since every pagan religion in the ancient world had its female deity, some converts from these systems placed emphasis on Mary, the mother of Jesus, until she likewise became an object of adoration and worship.

From the first century, The Epistle of Barnabas designated the Jewish Scriptures as the “Old Testament,” which were treated in an allegorical interpretation to bring out the Christian and spiritual meanings, but suppressing the historical and literal meanings and the uniqueness of Jewish history and people.[122] The Epistle to Diognetus (ca. 150) appropriated Jewish heritage while referring derogatively to the living Jews.[123]  For the “Old Testament” or “Old Covenant” was fulfilled in the person of Jesus through his death and resurrection with such religious fulfillment illuminated in the “New Testament.”  Origen, who was born in Alexandria, Egypt about 185 CE, applied Greek philosophy to Biblical interpretation, resulting in interpreting the Bible allegorically, which influenced theologians of the Middle Ages.

Two centuries later, St. Jerome established with the consensus of the church leadership the Christ-killer image from the verse “His blood be on us and on our children!” from the Gospel of Matthew and its relationship to the Jews by saying “[t]he curse has been fulfilled in their eternal damnation.”[124]  In Three Books of Testimonies Against the Jews, Cyprian (d. 258) wrote:

There is a new dispensation and a New Law, with abrogation of the Law of Moses and the old temple;

The Man of Righteousness was put to death by the Jews; they fastened Him to the cross;

 Now the peoplehood of the Jews has been cancelled; the destruction of Jerusalem was a judgment upon them; the gentiles rather than the Jews will inherit the Kingdom;

 Finally, by this alone the Jews could obtain pardon of their sins, if they wash away the blood of Christ slain in His baptism, and, passing over into the Church, should obey His precepts.[125]

In 250 CE, Bishop Cyprian of Carthage wrote in On the Unity of the Church that no person can have God as Father who does not have the Church as mother and thus Salvation outside the Church was impossible.  Bishops at this time extended their authority over the churches in their area.  Cyprian conceived of one universal Church in the world composed of many bishops who were the successors of the Apostles and only those who were part of the Church were saved.

With the establishment of Christianity as the state religion in the 4^th century, the Jewish position was further condemned.[126]  A theological “mystical anti-Semitism” emerged within Christianity, in which Jews were demonized with occult power.[127]  These mystical anti-Semitic stereotypes were used and effectively manipulated later by the Nazis.[128]

Before Constantine, the cross was not Christianity’s central symbol, but the life of Jesus rather than his death formed the basis of his followers’ belief.[129]  The adoption of the cross was to have inhuman consequences for the Jews.[130]  The cross of Jesus was wielded as a sword by Constantine.[131]  By using its power against the Jews, the official church betrayed the essence of Jesus’ faith and the church became the embodiment of the very power that killed Jesus, the power of the state.[132]

In the 4^th century, the meaning of the cross changed in the Christian imagination with Constantine into the “spear and transverse bar.”[133]  When Constantine had assembled his army in 312 for battle to take Rome, he saw in the sky above the Milvian Bridge on the Tiber a cross of light above the sun and the inscription “In this sign, Conquer.”[134]  According to Eusebius (260-339 C.E.), the bishop of Caesarea in his Life of Constantine on the strength of the vision and victory, the emperor became a Christian and so did the empire.[135]

With the Roman Empire in decline, Constantine sought a strong internal unity by proclaiming Christianity as the cement of the empire to achieve loyalty against the attacks of the barbarians.  Constantine maintained all of his pagan superstitions and placed the image of Apollo on one side of his coins and the name of Christ on the other.  On March 321 CE, Constantine decreed that the worship of Christians on Sunday be celebrated as the “Day of the Sun” as well.

Though pagan anti-Judaism emerged from Jewish separateness and chosenness of Judaism earlier in the centuries, it was not inspired by inter-religious rivalry as was with Christianity.[136]  Emperor Constantine legalized the privileges of the clergy and standardized church doctrine at the worldwide Church Council in Nicaea held in 325.[137]  At Nicaea, named for Nike the goddess of victory, Constantine forbid the observance of Easter at Passover time by declaring “[i]t is unbecoming that on the holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jew; henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people.”[138]

Until the Constantinian period, there was not such a separation between church and synagogue with Jewish Christians still honoring Torah and Christian Jews observing Shabbat and the Sunday Eucharist.[139]  The separation became between life and death with the “discovery of the True Cross” in Jerusalem by Constantine’s mother, St. Helena, and the construction of the basilica of the Martyrium, the tomb of Jesus.[140]  Emphasis shifted from Jesus coming to bring “life, life to the full,” to Jesus’ death for the sins of the world.[141]

With the Christian symbol of the cross, the “death of Jesus” replaced the “life of Jesus” at the center of Christian theology.[142]  The Crucifixion took the place of the Resurrection as the saving event and Christ the victim took the place of Christ the victor as the symbol of God’s love for the world.[143]  With the cross at the center of salvation, the blame for the cross shifted to the Jews.[144]   The “war of the cross” was a short journey from Constantine’s Milvian Bridge to Auschwitz for the Christ-killers.

St. John Chrysostom greatly impacted theological anti-Judaism by portraying the Jews as Christ killers and punished by dispersion.[145]  John Chrysostom (the golden-mouthed), a religious leader in late fourth-century Antioch becoming later the patriarch of Constantinople, used the Christ-killer label to proclaim that Christianity and Judaism were mutually exclusive.[146]  Chrysostom called the Synagogue “the temple of demons . . . the cavern of devils . . . a gulf and abyss of perdition” in order to sever any relationship between the Church and the Synagogue.[147]  Chrysostom delivered his sermons under the title “Against the Jews” during the mid-380s, several years after Emperor Theodosius I had made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.[148]  The Nazis used Chrysostom’s sermons with the deicide charge as anti-Semitic propaganda in their “war against the Jews.”[149]  Also, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) affirmed that the Jews killed Jesus, ignoring that the Romans actually put him to death.[150]

In the 6^th century, the abbey of St. Denis called the Kingdom of France the Chosen Nation, replacing Israel of the Old Testament, and national idolatry in Europe began.[151]  The vanity of national election remained embedded in French Catholicism into the 20^th century.[152]  During the 7^th century, Spain became ruled by the Visigoths, who claimed to be the Chosen People and Nation.[153]  Visigoth King Richard I (586-601) established the first anti-Semitic laws in Europe with prohibitions against circumcision, kosher food, Jewish Sabbath and festivals, and other forms of observance enforced with death by burning.[154]

Pope Urban II, in rallying Christians to join the First Crusade in 1096, instructed the crusaders to “take up the Cross,” to emblaze it on their clothing as a sign to take up arms against the infidels and to avenge the crucifixion of Jesus.[155]  Urban II promised a guarantee of eternal salvation to those who died in the struggle against the infidel with death as a religious act bringing grace.[156]

Since the year 638, the Muslims occupied Jerusalem, which was six years after the death of Muhammad (570-632).[157]  The Pact of Omar (637) by Omar I govern the relations between the Moslem and the people of the Book, in which Jews were forbidden to hold office and paid a head-tax in return for protection and exemption from military service.[158]

By the 10^th century, Jews were no longer admitted to the Temple Mount and in the early 11^th century all Jewish and Christian places of worship in Jerusalem, including the Holy Sepulcher, were destroyed by the ruling caliph.[159]  Christians were allowed in 1048 to rebuild a remnant of the Holy Sepulcher, but Jews could not rebuild their synagogues.[160]  To rescue “captive Jerusalem” and the Holy Sepulcher were to rescue a kidnapped Jesus and Jews were linked with the Muslims as the defiling enemy.[161]

During the First Crusade in 1096, half a million soldiers moved across Europe to Jerusalem, devastating the countryside as a hostile army with about 40,000 soldiers reaching Jerusalem.  Pope Urban II promised forgiveness of sin to those dying in the crusade.  There were eight other crusades, including the Children’s Crusade in 1212.  The papacy achieved prestige and profits from the crusades.

The Christian chronicler Guibert of Nogent (1053-1124) wrote “[w]e desire to combat the enemies of God in the East, but we have under our eyes the Jews, a race more inimical to God than all the others.”[162]  Godfrey of Bouillon, leader of the First Crusade, promised in 1099 “to leave no single member of the Jewish race alive.”[163]

The First Crusade was created by political leaders who exploited people’s fear of the Antichrist and the devil and, even before the official Christian armies assembled, gangs throughout the Rhineland attacked Jewish communities as the other “infidel” people.[164]   Widespread anti-Jewish violence occurred in Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Regensburg, Cologne and its surrounding communities of Metz and Trier and to the east in Prague.[165]

Although based on the Books of Moses, Judaism emerged as the culture of the Talmud, a culture of conversation, written and oral, reflecting on a compilation of the commentary of scholarly rabbis over the centuries.[166]  In the Rhineland Jewish communities, scholarly Talmudic learning centers were formed with Mainz as the most influential center of teachers.[167]  Rabbi Simeon the Great was the leading scholar of Talmudic learning during the 11^th century in Mainz.[168]

In the 11^th century, the international connections of the Rhineland Jews were highly valued as sources of exchange and commerce and they developed the Jewish practice of medical science.[169]  Jewish translators brought to Christian Europe knowledge of the Arabic culture and Greek classics, such as Aristotle.[170]  Local and Hebraic literatures were taught at Jewish schools such as the school in Mainz, which ranked with the best in Europe.[171]  Christians knew essentially nothing about Jewish learning and high culture during these centuries and throughout history.[172]

Peter the Prelate, or Peter the Hermit, was the leader of the Peasants’ Crusade whose sermons in the Cologne Cathedral linked the Crusade to the death of Jesus by the Jews.[173]  His congregation would run through the streets killing the Jews of Cologne.[174]  From April 17 to July 1, 1096, the number of Jews murdered or forced to suicide is estimated from 5,000 to 10,000, representing probably over one third of the Jews in northern Europe.[175]  After the pogroms throughout the Rhineland in the spring of 1096 with the deaths of thousands of Jews, a Christian theologian commented that “A beast was set loose and it would never be completely caged again.”[176]

In Worms and Mainz, almost the entire Jewish communities were exterminated.[177]  Many Jews chose to die as martyrs, Kiddush HaShem (for the holiness of God’s name), rather than to convert.[178]  During the Crusades, the periodic expulsion and return of the Jews led to the revival of the ancient myth of the “wandering Jew,” Ahasuerus, condemned to wander homeless until the Second Coming of Christ.[179]  After the First Crusade, Jews were denied many occupations and were restricted to the anti-Christian endeavors of banking and money lending.[180]

Pope Eugene III in March of 1146 launched the call for the Second Crusade.[181]  When the pope sought to organize the Second Crusade, Peter the Venerable, abbot of the French monastery of Cluny, urged King Louis VII of France to participate and openly called for attacks on the Jews at home.[182]  Peter the Venerable accused the Jews of dealing in holy objects stolen from churches and continuing to offend Christ and Christianity.[183]

Beginning from the end of the 11^th century, Catholic Christianity focused on the humanity of Christ that emphasized the pain and suffering of Jesus’ Passion.[184]  The Christ that now dominated the Christian religious mind and spirit was less a majestic creator-king than a human savior, whose crucifixion offered redemption to those who would have faith.[185]  The dogma of transubstantiation obligated Christians to recognize the human body of Christ in the Eucharist, in which the death of Jesus was the climax of his life.[186]  Christ’s actual presence in the Eucharist became the dominant icon of the late medieval church, which intensified the conception of the Jewish Christ-killer image and the anti-Jewish libels of Host desecration, ritual murder and ritual cannibalism.[187]

Religious sermons on what motivated the Jews to kill Jesus bore directly on the way in which Christians perceived and treated the Jews.[188]   St. Augustine in On the City of God explained that God did not slay the Jews in punishment for their crime of deicide, because of their blind ignorance of not recognizing Jesus as the Messiah and to serve as witnesses to the triumph of Christianity over Judaism.[189]  The “blind ignorance” of Augustine’s Jewish Christ killers needed to survive as part of medieval Christian society to demonstrate biblical prophecies of Jewish infidelity toward God.[190]  Augustine found support in Psalm 59:12 where God gives instructions for dealing with his enemies in: “Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law; scatter them by your might.” (Augustine’s Old Latin translation).[191]

Also, Augustine in Contra Judaeos detached the biblical heroes of the Old Testament from Jewish history by representing Cain, Hagar, Ishmael and Esau as the Jews who have been rejected and portraying Abel, Sarah, Isaac and Jacob as foreshadowing the election of the church.[192]  Augustine preached that the Jews, who were no longer chosen of God, were transformed into the sons of Satan and were to bring into the world “the son of perdition,” the Antichrist.[193]

Innocent III took the title Vicarius Christi, Vicar of Christ, and claimed to be between God and man, lower than God but higher than man, who judges all and judged by none.[194]  Rather than standing in the “Shoes of the Fisherman,” the pope claimed absolute spiritual authority at the right hand of God.[195]

Innocent III was the first pope to demand that Jews wear the yellow Star of David and persuaded the Fourth Lateran Council to make this church law, but he was unsuccessful in banishing the Jews of Europe into ghettos.[196]  Following the demand made by Innocent III and the Lateran Council of 1179, Pope Paul IV instituted the first ghetto in Rome and beginning from 1555 Jews were confined to walled-off areas where their occupations were severely limited and they lived in crowded poverty-stricken conditions.[197]  The Jews’ enforced separation was designed to keep their demonic influences away from Christian society.[198]

Pope Paul IV believed that the Reformation was a Jewish-inspired plot to destroy the Vatican as the Jews were the “fathers of iniquity and parents of Protestantism.”[199] In the papal states and in Rome, Pope Paul IV banned Jews from many trades and professions, banned the Talmud, banned Jewish High Holidays, banned kosher food, destroyed synagogues, prevented Jewish land ownership, forced the wearing of the yellow Star of David and special head coverings to warn Christians of Jewish presence.[200]

During the 3^rd Crusade, German nobles in 1197 formed the Teutonic Knights with allegiance to the crusading Pope, Innocent III.[201]  In the 13^th century, the Order of Teutonic Knights crusaded against the Hungarians and the original Prussians, a Baltic people.[202]  The Knights exterminated the indigenous people in Prussia, seizing lands and reducing the remaining natives to serfdom.[203]  They encouraged colonists from the German states to settle in Prussia and were constantly crusading against Poles and Russians.[204]  In the 16^th century, the grand master of the Teutonic Knights, a member of the Hohenzollern family that produced the future Kaisers, converted to Lutheranism.[205]

Pope Innocent III followed Augustine’s assumption that the Jews belong in Christian society by declaring that “Christian piety accepts the Jews who, by their own guilt, are consigned to perpetual slavery because they crucified the Lord.”[206]  However, beginning in the 1230s the church expressed concern over the Talmud and contemporary rabbinic Judaism, which did not fit within the Judaism of the Old Testament that Augustine had imagined Judaism to still be.[207]

In 1239, Pope Gregory IX issued orders for the confiscation of the Talmud and in 1240 King Louis IX of France condemned it as a perversion of the Judaism of the Old Testament and ordered its destruction.[208]  While the Talmud was burned in Paris during 1242, King James I of Aragon (1213-1276) issued an edict requiring all Jews in his kingdom to attend conversion sermons by the Dominicans and Franciscans.[209]

Pope Clement IV at the Synod of Vienna in 1267 proposed ecclesiastical enactments against the Jews, in which Jews and Christians could not have any contact or participate in any festivities, Christians could not take medicine from Jewish doctors, Jews were forbidden outside during Easter, Jews must pay taxes to the local clergy and Jews must wear the badge of the Tables of the Law.[210]

The Christian church realized that Judaism continued to develop, after Jesus’ crucifixion on the day when the New Testament replaced the Old.  If the New Testament charted the only legitimate direction, in which the religion of biblical Israel could develop and, if the Jews had survived only to testify to the Old Testament that gave birth to Christianity, then Talmudic Judaism was heresy and the Jews no longer filled the role that God had given their ancestors.[211]  Christians began to consider the Jew as a deliberate unbeliever and no longer the blind and ignorant Old Testament Jew, killing Jesus in error, but an agent of Satan.[212]

The leading English cleric Alexander of Hales (1183-1245) regarded the Jews as blasphemers and the same as the pagans that the Church was fighting in the Holy Land.[213]  The results of the writings of clerics such as Alexander and Robert Grosseteste, the bishop of Lincoln, changed the perspectives on the Jews from the Augustinian position of “slay them not” to everything was permitted from forcible conversion, expropriation, expulsion and murder.[214]

Beginning in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, allegations of brutal crimes were fabricated against the Jews, which often resulted in anti-Jewish violence and the seizing of property, livelihood and life itself.[215]  Accusations of ritual murder and ritual cannibalism, targeting Jews in the ancient Greek world before the birth of Christianity, were emerging again through (1) the charges of ritual murder by Jews killing innocent Christians, (2) the blood libel of Jews killing innocent Christians for their blood being used in Passover bread and (3) Host desecration by Jews defiling and attacking the consecrated Host of the Eucharist.[216]

As Christian devotion to Jesus’ blood evolved, Jews were accused of ritual murder for blood to mix into the unleavened bread for Passover, which was known as Blood Libel.[217]  However, for the Jew – Any person who consumes any blood – that soul will be cut off from its people. Leviticus 7:27.

The first recorded ritual murder charge occurred in 1146 in Norwich, England, where Jews were accused of having crucified a Christian boy, William, during Passion Week (who was apparently an epileptic and died after a seizure).[218]  Following the Norman Conquest, French Jews first arrived in England as chattels of the king with more Jews arriving to escape the crusader massacres, but the Anglo-Norman Jewish community lasted only 200 years before being driven out of England in 1290.[219]

Thomas of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, arrived in Norwich five years after the mysterious death of William of Norwich to reconstruct the “truth,” to establish sainthood for William and to prove that the Jews abducted William for ritual murder.[220]  In his Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, written in the early 1150s, Thomas by proposing sainthood for William probably received considerable personal gain and increased reputation among the clergy.[221]  The fame of a local Christian martyr and saint would have enhanced the religious importance of Norwich and its cathedral as a stream of pilgrims to William’s relics would bring prosperity to the town.[222]  Perhaps, Thomas believed that attacking the Jews could serve to unite Christian England and to improve the relationship between the Norman rulers and the conquered Anglo-Saxon population.[223]

Also, Jews were accused of crucifying boys in 1147 in Wűrzburg, in 1168 in Gloucester, in 1171 in Blois, in 1182 in Saragossa and repeatedly all over Europe even until the 20^th century.[224]  Although Pope Innocent IV issued a bull proclaiming the falsity of ritual murder, such as the alleged ritual killing of an eight-year old boy named Hugh of Lincoln, whole Jewish communities were slaughtered nevertheless.[225]

Repeatedly, Jews were accused of poisoning wells in Europe to kill Christians and as a result Jews were executed in Bohemia in 1163, in Breslau in 1226 and in Vienna in 1267.[226]  In 1321, Jews were accused of a plot to poison all the wells in France, resulting in Jews being burned at the stake and expelled from Paris.[227]  When the 1348 Black Plague was blamed on wells poisoned by the Jews, over 300 Jewish communities, including Mainz, Trier and Cologne were destroyed by anti-Jewish mobs.[228]

During the 11^th century, the Catholic Church established the sacrament of Holy Communion, whereby the duly ordained priest re-creates the Passion of Christ on the altar by consecrating the Eucharist and transforming the wafer and the sacramental wine into the body and blood of Christ.[229]  The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 formalized this belief that the wine and wafer were the blood and body of Christ and without communion no one could be saved and only the Catholic Church could administer it.[230]

The Catholic Church was founded as a church of ideas, of spirituality and of reaching souls.[231]  When the church acquired power, it realized that it was no longer the soul that mattered but earthly power.[232]  The Codex Iuris Canonici was developed in the 12^th century as the canon law of today’s Catholic Church, which enshrined the pyramid of ordained hierarchy with the pope as the supreme head of the Church and of creation.[233]

By the 13^th century, the Jews were accused of “desecrating the Host,” in which they would sneak into churches and stab the consecrated wafer until it spurted “blood.”[234]  In stabbing the host, the Jews are depicted as crucifying Christ once again.[235]  The “libel” spread throughout Europe, resulting in the deaths of thousands of German Jews in the Rintfleisch massacres in 1298 and in the Armleder massacres in the late 1330s.[236]

In 13^th century England with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290, the ballad “Sir Hugh, or the Jew’s Daughter” celebrated a famous blood libel and Christopher Marlowe’s Machiavellian The Jews of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice established a literary tradition of anti-Semitism.[237]  Although the Jews had been driven out since 1290, Shakespeare’s image of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice portrayed the English stereotype of the Jew as the image of the greedy money lender, the religiously unassimilable “other,” and with Shylock’s demand for the “pound of flesh” the ritual blood libel murderer.[238]  

The slaughter of all the Jews in the town was the happy ending in Chaucer’s “Tale of the Prioress” in The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400),[239] as a result of the ritual murder charge against the Jews.[240]  Blood Libel survived into the 20^th century with the most recent cases being the Beiliss trial in Kiev in 1912 and the riots in Kielce, Poland in 1946.[241]  Into the 21^st century, the Muslims have carried the Blood Libel charge against Israel.

Thomas Aquinas and his colleagues portrayed the Jews as the perpetrators of Jesus’ crucifixion and preached that the Jews understood who Jesus was and killed Jesus anyway.[242]  The Host-desecration libel implied that the Jews of all generations shared the guilt for the Crucifixion by knowing that Jesus was present in the Eucharist when they pierced it.[243]  The ritual murder and crucifixion libel was built on the conviction that all Jews of all times crucified Jesus and they reenact their crime relentlessly.[244]

The Host-desecration libel influenced “historical” chronicles, sermons, theater plays, holy site attractions for pilgrims and religious art even in the absence of Jews in the country.[245] For example, King Edward I expelled the Jews from England in 1290 and the Jews did not return to Britain until the late 1650s, yet Host-desecration stories in England continued during the 14^th and 15^th centuries.[246]

Ritual murder, the Crucifixion, the Jewish celebration at Passover, the bread of the Eucharist, partaking of Christ’s body that the bread became, the mystery of the blood of Christ all converged in anti-Jewish libels of ritual cannibalism known as “blood libel.”[247]  Not only were the Jews charged with ritual murder, but the Jews allegedly used the blood of their Christian victims for the ingredient in the unleavened bread for Passover, the Passover wine, and various medicines.[248]

The first reference in Continental Europe to medieval blood libel occurred in the German village of Fulda in 1235.[249]  The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II established a commission to investigate the blood libel at Fulda but found no evidence.[250]  The most celebrated blood libel was attached to the death of Simon of Trent on Easter Sunday in 1475.[251]  Simon of Trent was transformed into a martyr and saint by the blood libel and ritual crucifixion claimed by the Church.[252]

The bishop-prince of Trent, Johannes von Hinderbach, and a number of Franciscan preachers, such as Bernardino da Feltre, spread the popular Simon cult beyond Trent with woodcuts showing the martyrdom in dramatic details.[253]  The first book printed in Trent was The History of Simon of Trent in 1475 by Bishop Hinderbach’s physician.[254]

Not until the Second Vatican Council’s declaration of October 1965 did the Catholic Church withdraw the status of saint from Simon of Trent and declared that the Jews, who were tortured and executed for his murder, were innocent of the crime.[255]  Pope Innocent IV (1243-1254) did denounce the persecution of the Jews on charges of blood libel and cannibalism.[256]  Nevertheless, the accusations of blood libel only became more entrenched in Christian culture.

During the Black Plague between 1348 and 1351, 20 to 25 million people representing approximately one-third of the European population died of the disease, which was caused by a bacillus in the blood of rats.[257]  The Jews were accused of causing the plague by poisoning the wells and by the end of the plague few Jewish communities remained in Germany and the Low Countries after the slaughter in the Rhineland.[258]

During the Black Death, Jews in Berlin were either murdered or driven out of town and were not allowed back for four years.[259]  In 1510, the Jews of Berlin were accused by the Church of desecrating the Host and stealing religious vessels and over a hundred were arrested, resulting with 38 Jews burned at the stake along with the Christian who actually stole the vessels.[260]  In 1571, all Jews were expelled from Berlin and not until 1671 were Jews grant a writ of privileges to restore a Berlin Jewish community.[261]

After 1348, anti-Jewish stereotyping became more vicious as the Jew became the mortal threat against the Christian community.[262]  Medieval Christianity disseminated a grotesque and dehumanized image of Jews through sermons, passion plays and visual arts.[263]  The medieval passion plays re-enacted the crucifixion, in which Jews were cast as the traitorous executioners, wearing contemporary dress with the yellow Jewish hat and moneybags hanging from their belts as the people of Judas rather than the people of Jesus.[264]

During the 14^th century, gangs of “Jew-bashers” (Judenschläger) murdered Jews in Alsatia, the Rhineland and Swabia under the protection of the nobles who claimed they had divine inspiration to kill Jews as the Jews killed Jesus.[265]  The massacre of Jews occurred in the communities of Rouffach, Ensisheim, Ribeauvillé, Colmar and Mülhausen.[266]  The more Christians identified with Jesus’ suffering, the more they hated the Jews.[267]

By the summer of 1391 as Jewish communities were massacred across Spain driven by anti-Jewish clergy, a new class of people, the conversos, emerged of Jews who converted to avoid being killed.[268]  The mass conversion of the Jews in Spain resulted from two generations of sermon-inspired violence of convert or die.[269]

The Jewish presence in Western Europe was gradually declining with expulsion from England in 1290, from France in 1306 and in 1394 and from much of Germany during these periods and with banishment from Spain and Sicily in 1492, from Portugal in 1497 and southern Italy in 1541.[270]  Where they remained in Germany, the Papal States and in northern Italy, Christian hostility increased against the Jews.[271]  The accusations of blood libel and ritual crucifixion followed the Jews into Central and Eastern Europe and, with the return of the Jews to Western Europe, the libels returned.[272]

In 1399, the Jews of Poznan in Poland were accused of killing three Christians for use of their blood in matzo and thirteen Jewish elders were burned to death.[273]  In 1407, a priest in Cracow accused Jews of murdering a Christian child, which was followed by a massacre of Jews and burning Jewish property.[274]

Between 1530 and 1545, Blood Libel was spread by local Christians in the town of Amasiya in Black Sea region of northern Anatolia under the rule of the Ottoman Empire.[275]  The Amasiya Blood Libel was started by an Armenian woman who reported seeing Jews murder a Christian boy for blood at the Passover meal.[276]  The “murdered” boy was found alive, but the Jews who were accused had already been tortured and hanged.[277]

Since 1572, the Astronomical Clock in the Old Town Square of Prague strikes each hour with the Twelve Apostles emerging and Death ringing a bell while mocked by Vanity, the Turk and a bearded and horned Jew.[278]  After 1945 to whitewash Central Europe’s medieval anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust, the beard and horns were removed and the figure was renamed Greed.[279]  However, greed was the anti-Semitic portrayal of the stereotype Jew during the medieval passion plays.

The fury of the Inquisition in Spain was directed against Moors, infidels, heretics and Jews and Jews professing Judaism were burned alive.[280]  Torquemada began the Inquisition in Spain in hopes of receiving the favors of the Pope, making the Dominicans the most powerful and richest of the religious orders and securing a Cardinal’s hat.[281]  In 1555, Gian Pietro Caraffa, the papal nuncio in Spain and the grand inquisitor who had burned Jews, Judaizing Christians and the Talmud, became Pope Paul IV bringing the Inquisition into the papacy and issuing the bull Cum Nimis Absurdum.[282]  The bull mandated Jews to live in ghettos and they were forbidden to own real estate, to attend Christian universities and to hire Christian servants.[283]  Male Jews in Rome were required to wear yellow conical hats and women were to wear veils.[284]  In the preface to the bull, the pope explained that the purpose of the polices were to force Jews to conversion and to abandon the Augustinian view that Jews served God’s purposes by continuing to live as degraded “witnesses” among the Christians.[285]

In 1611, Pope Paul V allowed the blood purity standard from the 1547 Statute of Toledo, Spain, to enter the Roman Catholic Church in Rome by denying persons of Jewish descent to be admitted to canonicates of cathedrals, dignities in brotherhoods and offices entrusted with the care of souls.[286]  Blood purity regulations (limpieza regulations) were eventually revoked, but race entered into church history and race-based hatred became a part of theological anti-Semitism.[287]  Some Catholic institutions like the Jesuits were still applying blood purity restrictions, the limpieza legacy, into the twentieth century.[288]

The squalid ghetto below Vatican Hill lasted for 300 years as the whim of the popes until the soldiers of the French Republic imprisoned the pope and dismantled the ghetto in 1796.[289]  After Napoleon’s defeat, Pope Pius VII (1800-1823) rebuilt the walls of the ghetto until it was finally abolished when Pope Pius IX (1846-1878) lost control of Rome to the Italian nation in 1870.[290]  Pope Pius IX, who referred to Jews as “dogs,” was beatified to sainthood by John Paul II.[291]

Since the church outlawed the earning of interest by Christians, the nobility who owned the Jews used them to make loans to Christians and enriched themselves at the expense of the peasantry and the Jews.[292]  The Jews were casted forever as the demonic, blood-sucking usurers.[293]  By the late 16^th century in England, France and Spain, the image of the Jew as the blood-sucking usurer had become a literary stereotype, which was later adopted by Russian and American writers.[294]

George Sandys, an English visitor to the Ottoman Empire commented about the dhimmi status of Jews in Jerusalem in the early 17^th century by saying that:

Here also be some Jewes, yet inherit they no part of the land, but in their owne country do live as aliens, a people scattered throughout the whole world, and hated amongst whom they live; yet suffred, as a necessary mischief: subject to all wrongs and contumelies, which they support with an invincible patience . . . Many of them have I seene abused, some of them beaten; yet never saw I Jew with an angry countenance.[295]

With such popular English works as Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Dickens’ Oliver Twist, literary anti-Semitism reinforced the acceptable Christian behavior of humiliation, expropriation, forced conversion and death towards the Jews and influenced generations of authors and playwrights in England and in other countries.[296]

In 1840, the ritual murder-blood libel accusation appeared in Damascus when seven leaders of the Jewish community were tortured after being accused of killing a Christian cleric, Father Thomas, with his Muslim servant and used their blood for the Passover rituals.[297]  Local Christians accused the Jews of murdering the two men.[298]  Also, 63 Jewish children were imprisoned and Jewish homes were destroyed.[299]  The French government strongly supported its anti-Semitic consul in Damascus who accused local Jews of their involvement in the ritual murder.[300]  Later, it was determined that the friar had been killed by a Muslim.[301]

Around Damascus and in Palestine, there were nine incidents and four incidents of blood libel, respectively, between 1840 and 1900.[302]  In 1844, there were incidents in Cairo created by the Muslims and one in Alexandria created by the Greek Orthodox Church.[303]  The historian Tudor Parfitt described the blood libel in the Middle East:

In 1866, in Hamadan in western Iran, eighteen Jews were massacred following a ritual murder accusation – two more were burnt alive while the rest of the community only managed to escape the fury of the mob by converting en masse to Islam; there were further libels in Alexandria in 1870, in Smyrna in 1871, and Damanhur (Egypt) in 1871 and 1873, initiated by Muslims, and again in Smyrna in 1873.  In 1875 there was a blood libel in Aleppo, as a result of which the Pasha of Aleppo had to send troops to guard the Jewish quarter.  In 1876 there was another blood libel in Smyrna and one in Constantinople, while 1877 saw libels in Damanhur and Mansura, where the local Muslims accused the Jews of kidnapping a Muslim child and killing it in order to use its blood for matzot.[304]   

Between 1870 and 1940, more accusations of ritual murder, crucifixion and cannibalism emerged against the Jews than in all previous centuries combined.[305]  The Arab world continues to use Blood Libel in its anti-Jewish attacks, such as the Saudi newspaper Ar-Riyadh in 2002 publishing an article by a lecturer at King Faysal University concerning Blood Libel and the use of blood in the preparation of pastries for the Jewish Purim holiday.[306]  The leading newspaper of the Arab world, Al-Ahram, continues the blood libel lies.  The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet published racist blood libel accusations that the IDF was selling organs of Arab terrorists after Operation Cast Lead ended in January of 2009.

Through the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the Jews of Central Europe were forced to live in poor and overcrowded ghettos, subject to special taxes and restricted to money-lending, pawn-brokering and dealing in secondhand goods.[307]  After 1648, many a prince had a “Court Jew” handle his finances and should the prince’s high taxes or usurious loans anger his citizens; it was blamed on the greed of the Court Jew.[308]

Beginning in 1634 and every ten years thereafter the famous Passion play at Oberammergau, emerging from German Passion plays of earlier generations, demonized Jesus’ Jewish enemies on the stage and carried forward the Christ-killer myth from the Middle Ages.[309]  Hitler viewed the 1934 plays and the posters publicizing the 1934 production reflected the new Nazi propaganda, acknowledging the menace of Jewry.[310] The preface to the 1934 Jubilee Text of the Play describes how today “all of the German tribes feel again like one people,” saved from Jewish “Bolshevism” by the “suppression of the antichristian powers in our fatherland” and are experiencing a “new life which unites us all in our race.”[311]

In the 17^th century, the duchy of Brandenburg merged with Prussia to form East Prussia, which never lost its feudal ethos.[312]  In 1648, the settlement of the Wars of Religion gave each prince the right to enforce his own religion in his state and in Prussia the Lutheran clergy became essentially a part of the state.[313]  The Evangelical Lutheran church was the “spiritual army of the Hohenzollerns,” the kings of Prussia and the Kaisers of a united Germany.[314]  Nazi intellectuals, following in the footsteps of the Teutonic Knights, believed it was Germany’s destiny to seize Eastern Europe from the inferior Slavs and resettle it with Germans in pursuit of Germany’s sacred racial mission and the dominance of the Aryan people.[315]

In 1711, Johannes Eisenmenger published, with the help of Frederick I of Prussia, Judaism Unmasked that portrayed the Talmud as commanding the Jews to lie, cheat and murder non-Jews and repeating every Christian myth about the Jews.[316]  As a popular book for anti-Semitics in Europe, Eisenmenger’s book insisted that Christians must destroy the synagogues, confine the Jews to ghettos, degrade them in every way and avoid all unnecessary contacts.[317]

Dutch Calvinism and English Puritanism were more scripture based Christianity and considered the Old Testament as important as the New Testament, which led to increased religious tolerance extending to the Jews.[318]  In contrast, Martin Luther created a specifically “Germanic” way of being Christian, connecting it with nationalism.[319]

The German Lutheran tradition did not challenge political authority, but was subordinate to the state.[320]  In Germany, there was a union between government and the altar, as shown in government procedures in requiring the notation of religious affiliation in official documents and the government levy of an ecclesiastical tax.[321]

In contrast, the Huguenots and the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church supported freedom of worship even for Jews.[322]  Lutheranism in Prussia supported princely authoritarianism through the reign of Prussian kings and Kaisers to the appointment of Hitler as chancellor, which was welcomed by the vast majority of the German Evangelical clergy.[323]  The few Protestant clerics who opposed Nazi anti-Semitism, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoeller and Martin Dibelius, came from the Calvinist wing of the German Evangelicals, who had been commanded by the king to merge with the Lutherans in the Evangelical Protestant Union of 1817.[324]

Lutherans and Calvinists joined together to create the Evangelical Church of Prussia in 1817 with the belief of many that a religious union would lead to national union.[325]  For over a century, the Hohenzollern dynasty ruling Prussia were Calvinist and the general population was predominately Lutheran.[326]  The nationalist organizers merging the two Protestant faiths included in the draft constitution an explicit ban on Judaism, which they regarded as a “creed . . . detrimental to the causes of mankind.”[327]

In August of 1819 after the end of Napoleonic occupation, rioters in Bamberg, Frankfurt am Main, Darmstadt, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Dresden and Heidelberg attacked the Jewish neighborhoods across southern Germany blaming Jews for the bad harvests driving up the price of bread, food shortages, unemployment among artisans and the overall blaming Jewish financiers for their sufferings in the Hep Hep Riots.[328]   The rioters called out “hep hep” as they drove the Jewish communities out of their homes and towns.[329]  The phrase “hep hep” was allegedly derived from a Latin saying that was used during the Crusades, but another interpretation alleged that it represented the sound of a goat to mock the image of the Jewish beard.[330]

Although the 1812 Edict allowed Jews living in the Provinces of Brandenburg, Saxony, Pomerania and East and West Prussia to receive citizenship, which was a major event towards Jewish equality, true emancipation was achieved through conversion. [331]  Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Germany was considered the “third golden age” of German Jewry and living in Germany was a privilege.[332]  Jews in Germany were seen as the model of successful assimilation and Polish and Russian Jews looked to Germany for refuge and inspiration.[333]

In the 19^th century, many Jews saw Christianity not so much as “a name for a religion,” but as a culture rather than a religion and conversion as a means for emancipation.[334]  Felix Theilhaber, a Zionist critic of assimilation, published Der Untergang der deutschen Juden (“The Disappearance of the German Jews”) in 1911, arguing that German Jews through several generations of conversion, intermarriage, late marrying, and low birth rates were committing racial suicide where by the end of the 20^th century German Jewry would be extinct.[335]

After the Holocaust, Rabbi Maybaum, a Berlin rabbi during the 1930s, raised the question of whether God acted to prevent the disappearance of the European Jew by allowing this overwhelming disaster by the free-will of evil men.[336]  Yaakov Astor wrote that the Holocaust became the only connection many Jews had to Judaism and it became the unifying event reconnecting Jewish identity.[337]

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Franklin H. Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews: the Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience, (1^st ed. 1975), p. 82.

[2] Philippe Burrin, Nazi Anti-Semitism From Prejudice to the Holocaust, (English Translation 2005), p. 15.

[3] Ibid., pp. 15-16.

[4] Jocelyn Hellig, The Holocaust and Antisemitism, A Short History, (1^st ed. 2003), p. 164.

[5] Littell, p. 82.

[6] Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin.Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism, (2^nd ed. 2003), p. xix.

[7] Ibid., p. 13.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Abraham J. Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, (1^st ed. Sec. printing 1976), p. 8.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Glatzer, Nahum N., Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, (1^st ed. 1953), p. xxxi.

[12] Abraham J. Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, (1^st ed. 1955), p. 25.

[13] Ibid., p. 167.

[14] Ibid., p. 27.

[15] Ibid., p. 281.

[16] Ibid., p. 283.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid., p. 282.

[19] Prager and Telushkin, p. 16.

[20] Alexander A. Mandelbaum, Redemption Unfolding, The Last Exile, The Final Redemption, and Our Role in These Fateful Times, (3^rd ed. 2007), p. 83.

[21] Abraham J. Heschel, Israel, An Echo of Eternity, (1^st ed. 3^rd printing 1969), p. 98-99.

[22] The Chumash, The Stone Edition, Deuteronomy 6:4 [commentary].

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] David Patterson, Overcoming Alienation: A Kabbalistic Reflection on the Five Levels of the Soul,(1^st ed. 2008), p. 131.

[26] Ibid., pp. 20-21.

[27] Heschel, God in Search of Man, p. 59.

[28] Abraham I. Katsh, ed., Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, (1^st ed. 3^rd printing 1965), p. 157.

[29] The Chumash, The Stone Edition, Preface, p. xiii.

[30] Maimonides Thirteen Fundamental Principles of Faith: (1) I believe with perfect faith that God is the Creator and Ruler of all things. He alone has made, does make, and will make all things. (2) I believe with perfect faith that God is One. There is no unity that is in any way like His. He alone is our God He was, He is, and He will be. (3) I believe with perfect faith that God does not have a body – physical concepts do not apply to Him. There is nothing whatsoever that resembles Him at all. (4) I believe with perfect faith that God is first and last. (5) I believe with perfect faith that it is only proper to pray to God. One may not pray to anyone or anything else. (6) I believe with perfect faith that all the words of the prophets are true. (7) I believe with perfect faith that the prophecy of Moses is absolutely true. He was the chief of all prophets, both before and after him. (8) I believe with perfect faith that the entire Torah that we now have is that which was given to Moses. (9) I believe with perfect faith that this Torah will not be changed, and that there will never be another given by God. (10) I believe with perfect faith that God knows all of man’s deeds and thoughts. It is thus written, “He has molded every heart together, He understands what each one does.”[Psalm 33:15] (11) I believe with perfect faith that God rewards those who keep His commandments, and punishes those who transgress Him. (12) I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah. How long it takes, I will await His coming every day. (13) I believe with perfect faith that the dead will be brought back to life when God wills it to happen.

[31] Betsalel Philip Edwards, transl. & edit., Living Waters, The Mei HaShiloach: A Commentary on the Torah by Rabbi Mordechai Yosef of Isbitza, (1^st Rowman & Littlefield ed. 2004), p. xvi.

[32] Heschel, God in Search of Man, p. 283.

[33] Paul M. van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, Part 2, A Christian Theology of the People Israel, (1^st ed. 1987), p. 153.

[34] Mandelbaum, p. 9.

[35] Ibid., p. 15.

[36] Paul M. van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, Part 2, A Christian Theology of the People Israel, (1^st ed. 1987), p. 156.

[37] Patterson, Overcoming Alienation: A Kabbalistic Reflection on the Five Levels of the Soul, pp. 152-153.

[38] Van Buren, p. 159.

[39] Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Israel is Living, G-d is Living: The teachings of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, (1^st ed. 1994).

[40] Ignaz Maybaum, The Face of God After Auschwitz, (1^st ed. 1965), p. 36.

[41] The Chumash, Exodus 19:6 [commentary].

[42] David Patterson, Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary,(1^st ed. 1999), p. 107.

[43] Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews, (1^st ed. 2008), p. 82.

[44] Jonathan Sacks, Covenant & Conversation: Exodus: The Book of Redemption. (1^st ed. 2010), p. 201.

[45] Heschel, p. 99.

[46] Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews, (1^st ed. 2008), p. 5.

[47] Ibid.

[48] David Patterson, Wrestling With the Angel: Toward a Jewish Understanding of the Nazi Assault on the Name, (1^st ed. 2006), p. 45.

[49] Van Buren, p. 122.

[50] Maybaum, p. 26.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Ibid.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Van Buren, p. 116.

[55] Ibid., p. 122.

[56] Ibid., p. 123.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Rabbi Charles B. Chavel, trans., Ramban (Nachmanides) Commentary on the Torah, Exodus. (1^st ed. 1973), p. 171.

[59] Ibid., p. 173.

[60] Ibid., p. 171.

[61] Hellig, p. 166.

[62] Maurice M. Roumani, The Case of the Jews From Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue. (1^st ed. 4^th printing 1983), p. 20; James Parkes, A History of Palestine from 135 A.D. to Modern Times. (1^st ed. 1949), pp. 173-174.

[63] Elie Wiesel, And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs, 1969-,(1^st ed. 1999), p. 48.

[64] Prager and Telushkin, p. 72.

[65] Hellig, p. 138.

[66] Hellig, p. 90.

[67] Elie Wiesel, Evil and Exile, (1^st ed. 1990), p. 38.

[68] Hellig, p. 105. The Hellenistic period was inaugurated by the conquests of Alexander the Great (365-323 B.C.E.). Ibid., p. 113.

[69] Prager and Telushkin, p. 72.

[70] Rashi’s Commentary: “Astonishment” means that all who see you will see bewilderment over you. “A parable” means they will say of a similar suffering befalling a person. A “conversation” means they will retell of you.

[71] Exodus 17:8-16; Genesis 27:39-41.

[72] Hellig., p. 138.

[73] James Rudin, Christians & Jews Faith to Faith: Tragic History, Promising Present, Fragile Future, (1^st ed. 2011), pp. 86-87.

[74] Hellig, pp. 145-146.

[75] Ibid., pp. 146-147.

[76] Ibid., p. 145.

[77] Wiesel, And the Sea Is Never Full, p. 48.

[78] Hellig, p. 144.

[79] Wiesel, And the Sea Is Never Full, p. 48.

[80] Hellig, p. 147.

[81] Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, (1^st ed. 2010),/p. 81.

[82] Ibid.

[83] Hellig, pp. 149-150.

[84] Ibid.

[85] Ibid., p. 153.

[86] Ibid., p. 154.

[87] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, pp. 81-82.

[88] James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History, (1^st ed. 2001), p. 90.

[89] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 83.

[90] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 90; Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 84.

[91] Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East, (1^st ed. 2004), p. 153.

[92] Ibid., pp. 153-154.

[93] Ibid., p. 153.

[94] Ibid., p. 154.

[95] Ibid.

[96] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 84.

[97] Ibid., p. 85.

[98] Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: the Jews and the Passion From the Bible to the Big Screen, (1^st ed. 2007), pp. 28-29, 32.

[99] Jesper Svartvik, “Why is this Light Different from All Other Lights? The Berlin Theses as a Beacon Light of Hope in the History of Jewish-Christian Relations,” Sigtunastiftelsen, Stockholm (October 6-7, 2010), International Council of Christians and Jews, p. 4.

[100] Ibid.

[101] Cohen, Christ Killers, p. 29.

[102] Ibid.

[103] Ibid.

[104] Rudin, pp. 24-25.

[105] Ibid., p. 25.

[106] Ibid.

[107] Ibid.

[108] Ibid.

[109] Ibid., pp. 25-27.

[110] Siddur, p. xxiii.

[111] Ibid.

[112] Ibid.

[113] Carroll, Contantine’s Sword, p. 147.

[114] Ibid., p. 148.

[115] Cohen, p. 31.

[116] James Parkes, Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A study in the origins of antisemitism, (1^st ed. 1934), p. 120.

[117] Cohen, pp. 56-59.

[118] Ibid., 62.

[119] Littell, p. 26.

[120] Ibid.

[121] Ibid.

[122] Ibid., p. 27.

[123] Ibid.

[124] Ibid., p. 32.

[125] Littell, pp. 27-28.

[126] Hellig, p. 126.

[127] Ibid, p. 86.

[128] Ibid., p. 90.

[129] Hellig, pp. 206-207.

[130] Ibid, p. 207.

[131] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 152.

[132] Hellig, p,.207.

[133] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, pp. 175, 193.

[134] Ibid., p. 171.

[135] Ibid., p. 173.

[136] Hellig, p. 157.

[137] Hellig, p. 206.

[138] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 55.

[139] James Carroll, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World, (1^st ed. 2011), p. 101.

[140] Ibid.

[141] Ibid., p. 102.

[142] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 175.

[143] Ibid., p. 191.

[144] Ibid.

[145] Hellig, p. 210.

[146] Littell, p. 56.

[147] Norman Cohen, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,(1^st ed. 1967), p. 21.

[148] Littell, p. 61.

[149] Rudin, p. 18.

[150] Littell, p. 75.

[151] David P. Goldman, How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too), (1^st ed. 2011), p. 165.

[152] Ibid., pp. 201-202.

[153] Ibid., pp. 165-166.

[154] Ibid., p. 166.

[155] Cohen, pp. 119-120.

[156] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 240.

[157] Ibid., p. 238.

[158] Jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book 315-1791, (1^st ed. 1938), p. 13.

[159] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 252.

[160] Ibid.

[161] Ibid., p. 253.

[162] Ibid.

[163] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 19.

[164] Hellig, p. 211.

[165] Cohen, p. 120.

[166] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, pp . 248-249.

[167] Ibid., p. 249.

[168] Ibid.

[169] Ibid., p. 249.

[170] Ibid.

[171] Ibid.

[172] Ibid.

[173] Ibid., p. 250.

[174] Ibid.

[175] Ibid., p. 257.

[176] Carroll, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, p. 135.

[177] Hellig, p. 212

[178] Ibid.

[179] John Weiss, Ideology of Death, Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, (1^st ed. 1996), p. 31.

[180] Hellig, p. 212.

[181] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 269.

[182] Cohen, p 122.

[183] Ibid., p. 123.

[184] Cohen, p. 125.

[185] Ibid.

[186] Ibid.

[187] Ibid., pp. 125-126.

[188] Cohen, p. 83.

[189] Ibid.

[190] Ibid., pp. 84-85.

[191] Ibid., 84.

[192] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 86.

[193] Norman Cohn, p. 21.

[194] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 280.

[195] Ibid.

[196] Weiss, p. 32.

[197] Ibid, p. 30. The ghettos in Italy were not abolished until 1797. Ibid, p. 264.

[198] Hellig, p. 264.

[199] Weiss, pp. 29-30.

[200] Ibid., p. 30.

[201] Ibid., p. 32.

[202] Ibid., p. 33.

[203] Ibid.

[204] Ibid.

[205] Ibid.

[206] Cohen, p. 87.

[207] Ibid., p. 88.

[208] Ibid.

[209] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 333.

[210] Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England,(1^st ed. 2010), p. 132.

[211] Cohen, p. 88.

[212] Ibid., p. 93.

[213] Julius, p. 130.

[214] Ibid .pp. 130, 133.

[215] Cohen, p. 93.

[216] Ibid.

[217] Hellig, pp. 212-213.

[218] Ibid., p. 213; Haim Beinart, Atlas of Medieval Jewish History, (1^st ed. 1992), p. 44.

[219] Julius, p. 105.

[220] Cohen, p. 94.

[221] Ibid., p. 102.

[222] Ibid.

[223] Ibid.

[224] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, pp. 272-273.

[225] Hellig, p. 213.

[226] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 277.

[227] Ibid.

[228] Ibid.

[229] Ibid., p. 106.

[230] Ibid., pp. 106-107.

[231] Elie Wiesel and Richard D. Heffner, Conversations With Elie Wiesel, (1^st ed. 2001), p. 19.

[232] Ibid.

[233] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 279.

[234] Hellig, p. 213.

[235] Ibid., p. 214.

[236] Cohen, p. 103.

[237] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, pp. 364-365.

[238] Alan L. Berger and David Patterson, Jewish Christian Dialogue: Drawing Honey From the Rock, (1^st ed. 2008), p. 18.

[239] Cohen, p. 103.

[240] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 273.

[241] Cohen, p. 103.

[242] Ibid., p 108.

[243] Ibid., p. 109.

[244] Ibid.

[245] Ibid., p. 103.

[246] Ibid.

[247] Ibid.

[248] Ibid., pp. 109-110.

[249] Ibid., p. 110.

[250] Ibid., p. 113.

[251] Ibid., p. 110.

[252] Ibid., p. 111.

[253] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 89.

[254] Ibid.

[255] Cohen, p. 112.

[256] Ibid.

[257] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 338.

[258] Ibid., pp. 339-340.

[259] Martin Gilbert, Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past, (1^st ed. 1997), p. 21.

[260] Ibid.

[261] Ibid.

[262] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 340.

[263] Hellig, p. 211.

[264] Ibid.

[265] Julius, p. 15.

[266] Haim Beinart, Atlas of Medieval Jewish History, (1^st ed. 1992), p. 60.

[267] Hellig, p. 211.

[268] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, pp. 341-342.

[269] Ibid.

[270] Cohen, p. 111.

[271] Ibid.

[272] Ibid., p. 114.

[273] Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland, (1^st ed. 1986), p. 13.

[274] Ibid.

[275] Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 89.

[276] Ibid.

[277] Ibid., p. 90.

[278]Martin Gilbert, Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past,(1^st ed. 1997), p. 71.

[279] Ibid.

[280] John J. Stockdale, The History of the Inquisitions:including The Secret Transactions of Those Horrific Tribunals, (1^st ed. 1810), pp. 107, 276.

[281] Ibid., p. 113.

[282] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 375.

[283] Ibid.

[284] Ibid., p. 376.

[285] Ibid., p. 377.

[286] Ibid., p. 381.

[287] Ibid., p. 382.

[288] Ibid., p. 509.

[289] Ibid., p. 379.

[290] Ibid.

[291] Ibid., p. 380.

[292]Hellig, p. 212.

[293] Ibid.

[294] Ibid., p. 216.

[295] Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, pp. 90-91.

[296] Julius, p. 153

[297] Cohen, p. 115.

[298] Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, p. 108.

[299] Ibid., p. 109.

[300] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 281.

[301] Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, p. 109.

[302] Julius, p. 89.

[303] Ibid.

[304] Ibid.

[305] Cohen, p. 115.

[306] Ibid., pp. 115-116.

[307] Weiss, p. 30.

[308] Ibid., p. 31.

[309] Cohen, pp. 214-215.

[310] Ibid., p. 214.

[311] J.A. Daisenberger, The Passion Play at Oberammergau: A Religious Festival Play in Three Sections With 20 Tableaux Vivants. (1934 Jubilee Text), p. 9.

[312] Weiss, p. 31.

[313] Ibid., p. 33.

[314] Ibid., p. 34

[315] Ibid., p. 33.

[316] Weiss, pp. 31-32.

[317] Ibid.

[318] Hellig, p. 264.

[319] Ibid.

[320] Weiss, p. 28.

[321] Philippe Burrin, Nazi Anti-Semitism: From Prejudice to the Holocaust, (1^st English ed. 2005), p. 33.

[322] Wiess, p. 29.

[323] Ibid.

[324] Ibid., p. 34.

[325] Deborah Hertz, How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin, (1^st ed. 2007), p. 149.

[326] Ibid.

[327] Ibid., p. 150.

[328] Ibid, pp. 159-160.

[329] Ibid., p. 160.

[330] Ibid.

[331] Ibid., p. 108.

[332] Ibid., pp. 12-13.

[333] Ibid., p. 12.

[334] Ibid., p. 11, 13.

[335] Ibid., p. 14.

[336] Maybaum, p. 52.

[337] Yaakov Astor, The Hidden Hand, Uncovering Divine Providence in Major Events of the 20^th Century, (1^st ed. 2007), pp. 53-54.